Re: Line Wrapping Question

Terry Crowley <tcrowley@vermeer.com> Fri, 09 February 1996 18:13 UTC

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Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 12:42:23 -0800
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From: Terry Crowley <tcrowley@vermeer.com>
To: Ned Freed <NED@innosoft.com>
Cc: ietf-822@list.cren.net, Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, sukvg@wspu.microsoft.com
Subject: Re: Line Wrapping Question
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On the readability of text/enriched, the one biggest problem I find is the
<nofill> issue.  Although these mail composers we've been talking about provide
for automatic wrapping, not everyone uses it.  If they actually type the line
breaks themselves, their message comes out with a blank line separating every
line, which is annoying.

On the other hand, if they do that than the text/plain version might also have
ragged <long line>, <short line> pairs (if their lines are longer than the hard
break limit, which is easy to do with a proportional font and a wide window),
so maybe I've been too hard on text/enriched, when generated with as little
markup as possible.

A really smart system might notice whether text/plain or text/enriched would
result in a "prettier" uninterpreted output, and pick that.  Ah, that might be
too smart, users also like predictability....

Terry